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Jobs and the City

Opportunity and prosperity in New York City are spread thickly but unevenly. For too many New Yorkers, paychecks are too small and the rent too high. Life is uneasy, and recent economic and natural disasters have made it feel only more perilous, even as a luxury-apartment boom and gentrification have turned parts of the city into enclaves of prosperity and graciousness. People want jobs they can live on, in neighborhoods they can live in, but they don’t know how that is supposed to happen — or how the next mayor is going to make sure that it does.

The trick for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s successor will be in balancing apparent contradictions. Can a good business climate coexist with the higher taxes and more onerous regulations that some candidates are promising, or threatening? Can a future mayor promise higher wages, happier unions and more opportunities for minority- and female-owned companies and not send corporations fleeing to New Jersey? Can a city be said to be thriving with a fading middle class?

The end of the Bloomberg administration will be the end of 12 years of generally pro-growth policies that favored the city’s large financial engines (real estate and financial services) and smaller ones (health care, tourism and high-tech) with mixed results. The city has withstood recessions and global crises; its economy and population are growing. But persistent poverty and high unemployment have amplified fears of a stratified city, hollowed out in the middle, where the decent jobs and affordable apartments used to be.

Mayors face obstacles to being prolific job makers, from forces in the global economy to policies set by the federal and state governments. But there is still a lot they can do to build a city in which jobs can grow. Mr. Bloomberg has thought hard about the long term, about rezoning and infrastructure improvements and civic amenities that foster economic development. He has tried to build neighborhoods where people can both live and work. His aides point proudly to a new report showing strong job increases beyond Manhattan as evidence of planning and investments that have spread the growth around.

But not all jobs are good jobs. One of the fastest-growing job categories in the past decade is food service, in which wages are rock-bottom. A powerful report on the Bloomberg years broadcast this month by WNYC profiled a young man in the Bronx who used to work at two McDonald’s restaurants to cover his rent, which took up about three-quarters of his earnings. New York is an expensive place to live, but it should not take superhuman feats of drudgery to live independently.

The Democratic candidates are running to reset the city’s priorities without messing up the good things. Sal Albanese and Anthony Weiner stress helping the middle class, as John Liu and Bill de Blasio do the working class and poor. The City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, includes many Bloomberg-era innovations on her list of accomplishments; her goals include grand wishes, like “double the city’s exports” and “encourage domestic companies to bring American jobs back onshore.”

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Mr. de Blasio has framed the campaign as an all-out battle against inequality, proposing ideas like a higher income tax for people making $500,000 or more a year to pay for prekindergarten and after-school programs, and directing pension funds to investments in housing and infrastructure. He says that he wants to end “corporate tax giveaways” and invest in worker skills and what he says are “neglected industry sectors” in all the boroughs.

Most of the candidates have rightly focused on early education and job training as long-term solutions to matching New Yorkers with decent jobs. Mr. Albanese speaks with passion about bringing manufacturing back to the city. He talks about building subway cars, though 3-D printers and artisanal design products are probably more like it, and even the hottest start-ups in high-tech zones are adding only a few dozen jobs at a time.

Where the Democrats are lofty promisers, the Republicans are frustratingly formulaic. Joseph Lhota, a capable manager, says the usual about reducing stifling regulations and taxes and increasing the standard of living, but how that will work is unclear. John Catsimatidis, a supermarket billionaire, offers his rags-to-riches biography and a three-word mantra as a campaign theme (jobs, jobs, jobs), while not getting more specific or helpful than that.

The challenge in governing is balance. A generally favorable report from the nonpartisan Partnership for New York City said that under Mr. Bloomberg, the city “has often strayed from laissez-faire, pro-business orthodoxy” while still keeping “job creators” confident. The candidates who would succeed him need to present persuasive recipes for growth to do better, for a broader swath of the city, than what Mr. Bloomberg has achieved.